The Death Penalty Is On the Way Out

As long as the possibility exists for an innocent person to be put to death--and it has happened--the death penalty serves no purpose at all. Furthermore, it is extremely expensive and wasteful.

Even Texas, once the execution capital of the United States, is backing away from the ultimate penalty:

Even in Texas, which leads the nation in executions since 1976 (when the U.S. Supreme Court approved the practice after a brief moratorium), the wheels are coming off the bandwagon. From a peak of 40 executions in 2000, the Lone Star State put 10 prisoners to death last year and seven so far in 2015. According to the state’s Department of Corrections, the number of new death sentences imposed by Texas courts this year is precisely zero. There, as elsewhere, prosecutors, judges and jurors are concluding that the modern death penalty is a failed experiment.

The shift is more pragmatic than moral, as Americans realize that our balky system of state-sanctioned killing simply isn’t fixable. As a leader of the Georgia Republican Party, attorney David J. Burge, recently put it, “Capital punishment runs counter to core conservative principles of life, fiscal responsibility and limited government. The reality is that capital punishment is nothing more than an expensive, wasteful and risky government program.”

It's time to get rid of it once and for all.

The Death Penalty IS on the Way Out in the United States

I know there is still support from the majority of the public over the death penalty, but thanks to advances in forensics that have exonerated many a person convicted of murder, including a few on death row, support is rapidly plummeting.

The fact that once an innocent person is executed for a crime he or she didn't commit and there is no way to right such a wrong is reason enough for the death penalty to no longer exist. Errors can be made, murder cases are especially prone to prosecutorial and police misconduct and faulty witnesses.

I know, I know. People like Christian Longo and Rodney Alcala take up too much oxygen and have no redeeming value to our society, but the death penalty isn't something you can just pick and choose who to have the state kill and who to spare.

Besides, the death penalty is completely arbitrary and tends to single out those who are poor or are minorities; in other words, people who have less access to good defense lawyers.

The Death Penalty is on the Way Out in the United States,

with more states banning its practice and others considering following suit. I don't doubt the death penalty will be done away with in the United States, perhaps in my own lifetime.

Thanks to DNA and other advances in forensics, more innocent people are being exonerated, even including those who were wrongfully executed. Of course, as long as there are people who are prone to corruption, innocent people will still be sentenced to prison. Forensics aren't full-proof, and they can be destroyed by corrupt officials.

The death penalty, as noted in this piece, has been debated in this country for well over a century:

.Death penalty fervor was stoked by an explosion of sensational mass media.

Today’s TV may be the home of never-ending true-crime programming, but in the 19th century print media was the place to turn for the latest bizarre, sensational and gory true-crime stories. Beginning in the 1840s, America saw an explosion of magazines, newspaper stories, books, and pamphlets depicting the most gruesome crimes of the day. A titillated public gobbled up these sensational media offerings, which sparked outrage, fascination and fear. Could anyone be safe among the psychotic murderers who seemed to lurk everywhere?

Against this backdrop of mass-mediated fear, capital punishment came to be seen as a viable means of curtailing what was starting to look like a descent into depravity and wanton violence. Hysterical cries for executions were issued from pandering politicians to Bible-thumping preachers to anti-immigrant zealots eager to blame foreigners for crimes real and imagined. Early examples of this highly profitable print media included The American Blood Register; The Annals of Murder, or Daring Outrages, Trials, Confessions, etc; and The Lives of the Felons. From there it’s a straight line to Discovery ID, Nancy Grace, and other modern-day purveyors of true crime hysteria.

It's Long Past Time to Get Rid of the Death Penalty

With all of the technological advances that can determine guilt or innocence of a person accused of murder and the greater acceptance of life without the possibility of parole, there is no excuse whatsoever to have the death penalty. Now we are finding out there are quite a few people who made it to death row, and even some who have been executed, who had nothing to do with the crime for which they were sentenced or killed--murdered--by the state.

The case of Carlos DeLuna, an innocent man executed by the state of Texas, has received a lot of press in recent days. Here is the study which showed beyond any doubt he didn't commit the murder for which he was executed.

The link to the report is also on the left sidebar under "Links." It will remain there as long as the site is available.

Etc.

"Reformers" are trying to come up with a scheme to "evaluate" special education teachers even though that would be virtually impossible to implement given the diversity of learners and the fact those with the most profound disabilities actually can't meet anything approaching a benchmark and can easily regress.
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Maybe it will happen in my lifetime the death penalty will be abolished once and for all. Our politicians still support it for fear of being "soft" on crime, but the fact there are just too many wrongful convictions means our system of justice cannot be made foolproof. Once an innocent person is executed, and a few have been, there is no way to right it:

In Texas, Dallas County alone has uncovered 30 wrongful convictions since 2001, the most of any county in the country. Former Texas governor Mark White, a Democrat, said he continues to support the death penalty "only in a select number of cases," yet he believes that a "national reassessment" is now warranted given the stream of recent exonerations.

"I have been a proponent of the death penalty, but convicting people who didn't commit the crime has to stop," White said.

"There is an inherent unfairness in the system," said former Los Angeles County District Attorney Gil Garcetti, adding that he was "especially troubled" by mounting numbers of wrongful convictions.

A recent convert to the California anti-death penalty campaign, Garcetti said the current system has become "obscenely expensive" and forces victims to often wait years for death row appeals to run their course. In the past 34 years in California, just 13 people have been executed as part of a system that costs $184 million per year to maintain.
"Replacing capital punishment will give victims legal finality," Garcetti said.

This is a good piece from somebody whose family was involved in expanding the death penalty in California. All it did was create a monstrous boondoggle in taxpayer money.

Look no further than that damned Rodney Alcala. He has had three goddamned trials, all resulting in the death penalty, with the first two convictions overturned on technicalities. If he had just gotten life without parole from the beginning, that would have been the end of it, and his victims' families wouldn't have to face him in court ever again. He's going to die in prison anyway, with no chance of ever getting out. He has been there since 1979.

What a waste of money.

I cannot think of a single turning point in my thinking on the death penalty. My Catholicism teaches me that all life is precious, and that's certainly part of my viewpoint these days. But what resonates more in my mind is Dad's fondness for saying "facts are stubborn things." With hindsight's 20-20 vision and three decades of obstinate data, it's clear to my family that we created a fiscal monster that's taking a human toll on the very people we wanted to protect.

The ineffective legal beast created by California's death penalty laws costs taxpayers more than $100 million annually and ties up the lives of prosecutors and victims who could be moving on to other things.

We thought our 1978 initiative created a system to support victims' families. It didn't. The only people benefiting today are the lawyers who handle expensive appeals and the criminals who are able to keep their cases alive interminably.

The Briggs death penalty law in California simply does not work.

Here is a list of wrongful convictions in death penalty cases.

I Agree With the NYT

With all of the DNA technology and simple human error or corruption wrongfully convicting people, there is no way the death penalty can be fixed. It has to go.

Life without the possibility of parole is the answer to locking up the most dangerous people. With that punishment, those who are wrongly convicted at least have a chance to have the conviction overturned. Executed prisoners don't have that luxury.

Misc.

I am so grateful somebody in this economy is doing well.
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Now that Mitt has all but gotten the GOP presidential nomination thanks to his recent victories, calls for Rick Santorum to bail are increasing.
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Feminists have long decried the existence of beauty pageants, and the controversy over the fake female contestant "Jenna Talackova" may help in finally getting rid of the anachronistic contests.

After all, if men can compete in beauty pageants by fraudulently passing themselves off as "women," there is no point in having them.

Can you IMAGINE if "Jenna" actually won the Canadian contest and went on to win "Miss Universe"? What an insult it would be to the female sector of the human race to think the most "beautiful woman in the world" is actually a man! People with serious mental health problems would be celebrated for being surgically mutilated instead of getting the help they need. Real women would be thought of as not good enough to compete with fakes.

It's total madness. I blame the gay/lesbian community for ever accepting this pathology as anything resembling normal behavior going so far as to fighting for these people's "rights" to mutilate themselves and pass themselves off as something they aren't and never will be.

As for the general population, nobody outside of drag queen fans are going to watch the pageants anymore.
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Good news on the death penalty front: It is possible Connecticut will be the fifth state in five years to do away with the death penalty.

This despite public opposition which still can't wrap around its head that as long as there are not foolproof ways to ensure innocent people aren't put to death, the death penalty is not an acceptable way to deal with violent offenders. It's all about "an eye for an eye," revenge, and all common sense is thrown out the window.

Oregon Will Halt Executions

Not that any have been carried out since 1997 and only two since 1984, but at least this rather dipshitty governor Kitzhaber has done the right thing.

It'll likely cost him politically, but the death penalty IS a complete waste of money. Not to mention innocent people have lost their lives because of lousy counsel or crooked police/prosecutors or lying witnesses.

link

The moratorium will last as long as Kitz is in office.

Snip:

The governor, a physician who served two previous terms, from 1995 to 2003, noted that he had allowed the two earlier executions to go forward under his watch.

“They were the most agonizing and difficult decisions I have made as governor and I have revisited and questioned them over and over again during the past 14 years,” Governor Kitzhaber said. “I do not believe that those executions made us safer; certainly I don’t believe they made us more noble as a society. And I simply cannot participate once again in something I believe to be morally wrong.”

Cartoon of the Day

Thanks to Our Wonderful Bureaucracy,

inmate Troy Davis was executed last night, facts or enormous reasonable doubt be damned. Somebody in the legal/criminal justice system had to be protected, so what's another murder in the mix? I hope Davis's family sues the shit out of the state of Georgia over this.

The least the criminal "justice" system there should have done was commute his sentence in order to review the case while not killing him. If he actually did it, he would have spent his life in prison. There were enough holes in it to drive an 18-wheeler through.

But it doesn't matter. Retribution is a lot more important, even if somebody executed may ultimately be proven to have not committed the crime:

The barbarism of the process reached its epitome Wednesday night. In the hours before the lethal concoction was delivered, originally scheduled for 7:00 pm, Davis remained strapped to the gurney, while the high court deliberated. Family members and supporters stood in agony outside prison walls, waiting for news. The ruling came in the form of a one-line denial, without explanation or dissent.

It would have taken only five justices’ votes to stop the killing going forward. In the end, even this temporary measure was rejected by the black-robed executioners.

Peaceful protesters outside the prison, at one point numbering in the thousands, were surrounded by hundreds of police officers, some decked out in riot gear, while helicopters circled overhead. Earlier in the evening several demonstrators who crossed the road running past the prison were arrested and taken away.

Davis issued a written statement before his execution, which read: “The struggle for justice doesn’t end with me. This struggle is for all the Troy Davises who came before me and all the ones who will come after me.”

Those justices are murderers, pure and simple.

News, Etc.

A group called "Parent Revolution" is nothing more than another front group backed by the usual suspects:

With funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Wasserman Foundation, the Eli and Edyth Broad Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation, Parent Revolution has more than enough dinero to keep up the rhetoric and the supporting antics. But that obscures real educational issues and keeps their followers from asking about the group’s real agenda, which unfortunately is all about charter schools, and not about Julio and Jamal or their sisters and brothers ever becoming educated.

Enough said.
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A possibly innocent man on Georgia's death row is likely to die.

What a farce the death penalty is.

While 51 members of the US Congress have gone on record opposing the execution of Troy Davis, there has been no significant effort from politicians of either big business party to call a halt to it. Barack Obama has made no comment on the impending execution, and his press secretary has referred media questions about the case to the Justice Department.

Obama is an open supporter of the death penalty, writing in his memoir that while he thinks capital punishment “does little to deter crime,” he supports it in cases “so heinous, so beyond the pale, that the community is justified in expressing the full measure of its outrage by meting out the ultimate punishment.”

In recent years, the US Supreme Court has ruled that executions of the mentally impaired and those convicted of crimes as juveniles are unconstitutional, but it has done so to uphold the system of capital punishment overall, a barbaric practice outlawed by the vast majority of industrialized nations.

It appears somebody's butt is being covered, so somebody else has to die for it.
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Of course any proposal to forgive student loan debt is dead in the water, but people can sign a petition in support of it anyway.
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Surprise, surprise!!! The dynamic duo of the Koch brothers have tied for fourth place on the Forbes list of richest Americans.
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News, Etc.

Aren't you happy the Forbes 400 got richer so you can have even less?

And people like the Kochs aren't even happy with a mere $21.5 billion apiece; they want to buy political opinion so they will have even more.
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Thanks to the USSC, a West Virginia woman will receive the death penalty while the men who actually did the killings merely get life sentences.
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The UN had a "poverty summit," but the real poverty is the poverty of ideas of what to do about it. The United States, for example, wants to continue the same failed neoliberal garbage which does nothing to help people.

Miscellaneous News

The American Law Institute has decided to gut its death penalty framework by declaring it a failure:

The institute is made up of about 4,000 judges, lawyers and law professors. It synthesizes and shapes the law in restatements and model codes that provide structure and coherence in a federal legal system that might otherwise consist of 50 different approaches to everything.

In 1962, as part of the Model Penal Code, the institute created the modern framework for the death penalty, one the Supreme Court largely adopted when it reinstituted capital punishment in Gregg v. Georgia in 1976. Several justices cited the standards the institute had developed as a model to be emulated by the states.

The institute’s recent decision to abandon the field was a compromise. Some members had asked the institute to take a stand against the death penalty as such. That effort failed.

Instead, the institute voted in October to disavow the structure it had created “in light of the current intractable institutional and structural obstacles to ensuring a minimally adequate system for administering capital punishment.”

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A young Sparks, Nevada, area woman is battling a rare skin disease which has caused her to give up career ambitions and forced her to go on disability:

n June 2009, Hail was diagnosed with hidradenitis suppurativa (HS), an extremely rare, chronic skin disease that creates blockages around oil glands and hair follicles of various areas on the body. It causes blotchy abscesses on the outside of the skin, embeds epidermic cysts under the skin and traps fluids created by the body’s sweat glands. Though its infections and inflammations look like typical acne, the disease is painful and nearly disfiguring to the body after multiple surgeries, which are often needed to remove the excess fluids.

Hail was diagnosed at stage three, the worst of the condition, and she has abscesses the size of baseballs, scarring and sinus tract formations.

Even worse, little can be done because so little is known about HS. Hail, now 21 and a Fernley resident, who said she’d been rather shy about it in the past, now wants to help raise awareness and education to help those who suffer from it and that the medical community perhaps one day might find a cure.

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Pepsi Throwback, the drink I love so much, is making a limited-time comeback for two months.

Production started last week.
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Of course the "G-spot" was nothing but a hoax. It was clear from the time that silly book from 1982 came out.

Some authors got rich off it, though.
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The Suleman octuplet's doctor is being accused of gross negligence by the state.
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An L.A. judge has set a hearing for the Polanski case.
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I'll provide this link in case anybody gives a shit about Warren Beatty.

Personally I find him disgusting.
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The Washington Post has a photo gallery of the world's tallest buildings.
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The Death Penalty

doesn't solve anything, and although few miss the late D.C. sniper John Allen Muhammad, who was executed last night, he was clearly not all "there" in the head when he went on his murderous rampage with his accomplice.

Miscellaneous

Lance Mackey won his third consecutive Iditarod.
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New Mexico has officially banned the death penalty, thus joining 14 other states which have banned it.
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Campaign Notes.

Although the USSC made the correct decision regarding the death penalty and child rape, as awful as the crime is, leave it to Barack Obama to exploit it by cynically trying to get right-wing votes.

Shit, why bother to vote if both major candidates are two sides of the same right-wing coin?

Obama’s rush to embrace the right-wing minority on the Supreme Court is a clear demonstration of his political trajectory. Having become the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee—and given the overwhelming popular hostility to the Bush administration and the Republican Party, in a strong position to win the White House—he is moving rapidly to the right, seeking to demonstrate his reliability and fitness to govern from the standpoint of the financial aristocracy that really rules America.

Despite claims Obama is a "liberal," he always was to the right, surrounds himself with right-wing or libertarian economists and neocon foreign policy experts, would sell out Democratic Party principles in order to appease the right, and therefore he CANNOT be president representing the Democratic Party since he is not a Democrat anyway. He's nothing more than a ringer being used to divide the Democratic Party's key constituencies. We'd be much better off with a McCain presidency and a Democratic Congress, as bad as McCain is.

The GOP and the GOP-leaning media have completely undercut the opposing political party for their own ends thanks to a massive propaganda campaign and dirty political tricks.

Legimate Questions

are being asked about the Austrian justice system where there doesn't seem to be a punishment that appropriately fits the heinous crimes of Josef Fritzl.

Fifteen years is way too lenient, regardless of the likelihood he would not live out his prison term.

In this country, he would get life without parole and, if he lived in Texas or Florida, he'd even face the death penalty.

In the meantime, authorities are looking for witnesses in the case, including every person who lived in the Fritzl house over the past 24 years.